Author: Harvard Gazette Online

When you love something, sometimes you just can’t let it go. For Melanie Baskind ’12, that something was lacrosse.

Baskind was voted Rookie of the Year in soccer by the Ivy League in 2008, and was a critical force behind the Crimson’s two consecutive Ancient Eight titles and two NCAA tournament appearances. But the truth is that soccer was just one of her loves.

Named the 2008 Boston Globe Athlete of the Year, the Framingham, Mass., native starred in three sports in high school (soccer, lacrosse, and hockey), but when she arrived at Harvard, she chose to focus on soccer to start.

“It definitely was a soccer thing for me,” said Baskind. “A lot of schools would contact me, not really knowing I played the other sport. But I always knew that soccer was going to be my focus, and I didn’t want to commit to playing lacrosse before I got here and figured out what my situation was going to be on the soccer team and academically.”

Helping the Harvard women’s soccer team to a 13-3-5 record, Baskind finished seventh in the Ivy League in scoring and tied for fifth in goals and assists. In addition to being honored as the league’s top newcomer, she was named second-team All-Ivy League and tabbed on Soccer Buzz’s Freshman All-America third team.

After her first soccer season, the versatile Baskind had a decision to make. She could either put aside her shin guards and pick up her lacrosse stick, or the neurobiology concentrator could take the season off, revisiting the decision as a sophomore.

“It was all about soccer last season, and in the preseason [last year] I wasn’t really thinking about lacrosse,” she said. “I was going back and forth about whether it was something that I wanted to do, and ended up deciding it wasn’t a good time for me to do it last year, for a bunch of different reasons.”

Upon completing her second championship soccer season this year, Baskind again considered returning to lacrosse and decided that, with a year under her belt, it was time.

“My situation with school changed a little bit. I was more comfortable with my position on the soccer team,” she said.

After talking to head coaches, assistants, and captains of both teams to make sure everyone knew where she was coming from, the encouragement she received was enough to ease her concerns about coming back to lacrosse.

“I was grateful that both sides have been very supportive with whatever decision I decided to do, last year and this year, and it definitely made it easier.”

In retrospect, her joining the team turned out to be a bigger deal than first expected. In the second game of the season on March 6, Harvard saw junior midfielder Jessica Halpern — the team’s leading scorer from a year ago — go down with a season-ending injury. It was a devastating blow for the team, but it also meant that Baskind would have to come in and contribute right away. That is something she has had no problem doing. She is second on the team in goals and points, and tied for first in assists.

“I think, in some ways, Jess is irreplaceable on the field. I think what Melanie added right away was the big-game experience that she carried over from soccer,” said Lisa Miller, who is in her third year coaching Harvard. “I would have loved to have them both on the field at the same time, but it was definitely a gift to have Mel with that experience, versus a freshman who isn’t gamed-in.”

As Harvard enters the heart of its schedule, jockeying for positioning in the Ivy League standings, Baskind has quickly found herself a core team member in two sports she loves.

That love is something that makes feasible the challenge of balancing two athletic seasons, everyday friendships, and a demanding academic workload. “It’s a ton of sacrifices,” she said. For instance, Baskind had to stay in Massachusetts over spring break while the soccer team traveled across Italy.

“I’ve really enjoyed the experience, and I’m willing to make sacrifices for that. I think my friends have been great about understanding a lot of social stuff I’ve had to miss out on, which I knew was going to happen, coming into it. I think the soccer team has been great about understanding that I’m not going to be able to go to as many team functions as I could have been.”

Despite the sacrifices, her coach notes that she always has a smile.

“I think one of the things Mel brings to practice is a sense of humor, and she has fun, even in the middle of a game. Very rarely can a player make me laugh when my team is not doing well,” said Miller. “I think the players who play two sports generally like to play, like to compete. They like the camaraderie of being part of the team, and Mel definitely brings that.”

And so as Baskind shares her fun-loving attitude with her new team, it is clear that her year’s absence didn’t diminish her passion for the sport.

“She just likes to play, and I think that’s contagious, and it rubs off on other people, and it definitely rubs off on the coaching staff,” said Miller.

Twice a week, Stephen Blyth leaves Harvard Management Company’s (HMC) modern trading floor in downtown Boston and travels to Harvard Hall, built in 1766, bringing real-world financial savvy to the statistics classroom.

Blyth, a Harvard statistics Ph.D. who is managing director of HMC’s internal investment team, joined the company four years ago. In addition to his investing duties, he had hoped to resume teaching, something he had last done as an instructor at Imperial College London in the early ’90s. But the time wasn’t right. HMC was in the midst of a leadership change, and then was aggressively managing the impact of the international financial crisis.

This year, the time is finally right. Blyth is teaching statistics 123, “Applied Quantitative Finance on Wall Street.” The class introduces statistics and applied-math students to modern financial markets and to the statistical tools involved with them. Blyth draws lessons from his own experiences — some from the same day — and from broader financial topics, such as the factors that led to the recent global financial meltdown.

“A lot of the course is distilled out of problems that I encountered over the last 15 to 20 years working on Wall Street,” Blyth said recently in his HMC office in the Federal Reserve Bank building. “When I’m not teaching, I’m over here buying and selling the things I’m talking about in class.”

Statistics Department Chair Xiao-Li Meng, the Whipple Jones Professor of Statistics, said Blyth’s experience is a plus for students because it shows the importance of statistical analysis on everyday finance.

“Stephen’s extensive experience on Wall Street, combined with his ‘Main Street’ training as a Ph.D. statistician, puts him in an ideal position to showcase to students the impact of rigorous quantitative reasoning — or lack of — on financial markets,” Meng said.

Blyth grew up in North London and attended Cambridge University, receiving his bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1988. He came to Harvard’s Statistics Department in 1988 and graduated in 1992. After a yearlong postdoctoral fellowship at Imperial College London, Blyth was a statistics lecturer there for a year.

Around that time, Blyth said, he was pondering his future and figuring out a way to get back to the United States. He ran into two roommates from graduate school, theoretical physicists who had scrambled for work when Congress canceled the superconducting supercollider, the gigantic atom smasher that had been planned for Texas. They both wound up in finance and told Blyth that the field contained interesting problems.

Blyth began to explore opportunities in finance, taking a job as a junior trader for HSBC Bank. Without a finance background, he struggled at first and was considering returning to academia when things suddenly “clicked” for him. After that, Blyth found himself not only intrigued by the complexity of the problems he faced, analyzing derivatives for investment opportunities, but he was enthralled by the dynamism of the trading floor, where money was made and lost every day.

He moved to New York with HSBC and then took a position with Morgan Stanley, eventually becoming a managing director. From there he moved to Deutsche Bank, where he worked until coming to HMC.

Before joining HMC, he noted that then-HMC President Mohamed El-Erian was teaching at Harvard Business School, so he contacted Meng to explore the possibility of teaching in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ Statistics Department.

“I really enjoyed being on Wall Street — the mathematical complexity, the real-time nature, the dynamism — but there was always something missing, in terms of the intellectual mission,” Blyth said.

Harvard Management President Jane Mendillo said Blyth’s second role at Harvard helps bring Harvard Yard and the student experience closer to HMC’s offices and allows the corporation to play an expanded role in the Harvard community.

“Stephen Blyth is a very talented investor, a devoted Harvard alum, and an adept manager and mentor in his role here at HMC,” Mendillo said. “I’m delighted that he has the opportunity to share his enthusiasm for statistics and his world-class skill in finance with Harvard students, whose education, after all, is the reason for what we do. This collaboration not only brings the student experience closer to HMC’s trading floor, it also highlights another dimension to HMC’s role in the broader Harvard community.”

There are about 85 students in the class, Blyth said, covering a broad spectrum of ages and academic experience, from freshmen to statistics graduate students. Some students have little financial experience, while others have interned on Wall Street, he said.

“I’ve really enjoyed it. It’s a very good introduction to the practical applications of math on Wall Street,” said Sumit Malik, a freshman considering a concentration in applied math or economics. “It’s very helpful to get that inside perspective, but it’s also valuable to see how what we’re learning is used.”

Taylor Yi, a junior statistics concentrator, said the course matches his interest in finance well. He particularly likes that, for part of the class, Blyth puts on a trade (though not with real money) using platforms at HMC and Deutsche Bank so students can see how it is done in the real world.

“That’s cool,” Yi said. “You don’t often get a real-world trading experience.”

Blyth said getting back to the Yard has reminded him of his days as a student, when he was a resident tutor at Winthrop House and started the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences soccer team.

“Teaching reminded me of all the great things Harvard has to offer, particularly the students,” Blyth said.

The Harvard Club of Australia Foundation recently awarded fellowships to six Harvard researchers who intend to undertake collaborative scientific research in Australia in 2010.

As in previous years, the foundation’s fellowship grants take the form of donations to the recipients’ host Australian institutions to assist with fellows’ travel and living expenses.

Fellowship recipients for 2010 follow:

Richard L. Stevens, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and professor in the Division of Rheumatology, Immunology and Allergy at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, is a world leader in studying an immune cell known as the “mast cell,” with a special focus on inflammatory bowel disease for which there is no long-term cure. He is collaborating with Steven A. Krilis, in the Department of Medicine at the University of New South Wales and St. George Clinical School, Sydney, and with Paul Foster at University of Newcastle. Stevens will be based in Sydney for his six-month sabbatical.

Jonathan B. Losos, the Monique and Philip Lehner Professor for the Study of Latin America and curator in herpetology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, will conduct research in Australia on evolutionary diversification of agamids, a family that includes crocodiles. His collaborators are Rick Shine, professor of evolutionary biology, and Mike Thompson, professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Sydney. Losos will spend four months in Australia, and will be based in Sydney, but will collect specimens in Australia’s far north.

John Quackenbush, professor of computational biology and bioinformatics in the Deptartment of Biostatistics in the Harvard School of Public Health and professor of cancer biology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, will study cell networks and cell differentiation and build models to help understand how cells transition from one state to another. His principal collaborator is Christine Wells, a chief investigator at the National Centre for Adult Stem Cell Research at Griffith University, in Queensland, Australia. Quackenbush will also work with Emma Whitelaw, Queensland Institute of Medical Research, in Brisbane, Australia, and Louise Ryan, of Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, in Sydney. Over his four-month sabbatical based in Brisbane, Quackenbush will use Wells’ existing database of olfactory stem cells to build predictive models incorporating ideas borrowed from theoretical quantum physics.

Ali Khademhosseini, assistant professor of health sciences and technology and assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, will conduct research on tissue engineering, focusing on micro-scale techniques in applications using biodegradable biomaterials. He will collaborate with associate professor Fariba Dehghani, and director of postgraduate studies at the University of Sydney’s School of Chemical and Bio-molecular Engineering. Their overall aim is to develop long-term collaboration between the University of Sydney, Harvard, and MIT, and to underpin future substantial research grants. Several papers are already in preparation. Khademhosseini will visit Sydney for two months.

James Macklin, director of collections and informatics in the Harvard University Herbaria, and Paul J. Morris, biodiversity informatics manager in the faculty of Arts and Sciences, will study biodiversity informatics. They have an ongoing collaboration with the Australian National University (ANU), and the Australian National Herbarium Centre for Biodiversity Research, specifically with Greg Whitbread and Jim Croft. Their visit to ANU is aimed at advancing the International Plant Names Index (IPNI), an ongoing collaboration between Harvard’s Herbaria and Australian National Herbarium in Canberra, and to prepare a technical implementation proposal of international significance for consideration by the Harvard-Kew Gardens-Australia IPNI management team.

A collaboration by the Foundation Alícia (Alimentació i Ciència), headed by chef Ferran Adrià of El Bulli fame, and the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) has led to the creation of an undergraduate course on science and cooking.

Debuting next fall, “Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter” will be part of the new program in General Education at Harvard College. The course will bring together eminent Harvard researchers and world-class chefs, including Wylie Dufresne of wd-50 and Dan Barber of Blue Hill, as well as food scholar and writer Harold McGee, one of the leading authorities on kitchen science.

Adrià is considered a pioneer of exploiting scientific principles to push the limits of modern cuisine, manipulating the physical and chemical processes of cooking by using substances such as hydrocolloids, or “gums,” that enable a delicate fruit purée to be transformed into a dense gel, and deconstruction techniques such as spherification, creating a resistant skin of liquid (as in a pea soup held in a pod of nothing more than itself).

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The Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada and the Henry Luce Foundation have named Francis X. Clooney, the Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology at Harvard Divinity School, one of six Henry Luce III Fellows in Theology for 2010-11.

The Luce Fellows program was established in 1993 to identify leading scholars in theological studies and provide them with the necessary financial support and recognition to facilitate their work. Clooney was selected as a Henry Luce III fellow for his excellence and creativity in theological commentarial writing. The fellowship program is one of the premier fellowship programs for theological scholarship.

Called to volunteerism by his “restless interest in social change,” Scott Ruescher is modest when discussing how each Thursday he heads to the Amigos School in Cambridge to relate stories to his reading buddies there. He’d rather play his kazoo.

Inside Ruescher’s office at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), where he is a coordinator for the Arts in Education Program, joyous treasures lie. A fluorescent kazoo is one of the knickknacks decorating Ruescher’s desk, alongside artwork by graduates of the program and a glass apple paperweight, a gift from HGSE for his 20 years of service.

He’s hesitant to discuss that, too. He’d much prefer to do some sketching, as he does from time to time, applying the lessons he’s picked up from classes at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. Or he could show you his chapbook, “Sidewalk Tectonics,” published by Puddinghouse Press, that he calls “a meandering travelogue of poems,” which begins at Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace in Kentucky and moves to Memphis, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

If it was his interest in social issues that spurred the chapbook, it’s also what inspired him to travel to El Salvador with Learning Through Libraries, a program helmed by HGSE students promoting literacy and libraries in the poor rural municipality of Caluco. “I painted murals with schoolchildren,” said Ruescher of his week there, “played with the kids, and mingled with their mothers and teachers.”

He helped to organize and catalog a horde of donated books, too, and spent one afternoon cleaning a classroom soon to be transformed into a library. “I was standing on desks, with a wet rag in one hand and a pail of water in the other, washing off the dust of the nearby volcano and chatting with the teachers,” he recalled with poetic luster. “I even enjoyed getting stung by a wasp — and getting to use the word avispa in Spanish — after accidentally swiping a nest above the doorway with my rag.”

Ruescher grew interested in Latin America when he lived in Jamaica Plain, which has a large Hispanic population, in the 1970s. He has traveled a bit in Mexico, and he spent the week preceding the El Salvador project on his own in Guatemala, where he found that his Spanish is “somewhere between proficient and not quite fluent,” he joked. He’s spent the past two years (of nine volunteering at the Amigos School) reading in Spanish to second-graders. Last year, he was awarded the Mack Davis Award by the Cambridge School Volunteers for his dedicated duty.

Ruescher, an Ohio native, said he started off volunteering at a mental hospital and for a sociological researcher when he was in college. He has volunteered for Oxfam America and other organizations as well. “I started teaching English in a prison program for UMass in the ’80s,” he remembered. For the past eight years, Ruescher has taught at MCI-Norfolk, a medium security prison, for the Prison Education Program at Boston University’s Metropolitan College.

Ruescher maintains a community garden plot in Cambridgeport, where he lives, and has written numerous guest commentaries on local environmental issues for the Cambridge Chronicle. He is working on more poems about his time in Central America and plans to return on a Learning Through Libraries trip. In the meantime, Ruescher hopes his chapbook is flying off shelves at the Grolier Book Shop, a nearby poetry retailer.

If book sales are fueled by good karma, Ruescher’s got nothing to worry about.

“Photography and Chance,” the title of art historian Robin Kelsey’s forthcoming book, also could describe his unusual career trajectory.

For example, there was a short stint in the mid-1990s as a lawyer.

“I really didn’t enjoy law practice,” Kelsey conceded. “I love argument, I love debate, I was an intensive debater in high school, did some debating in college, and actually ended up coaching the Yale debate team when I was in law school. But I also love writing about pictures, and find that pictures draw me in a way that just working with text doesn’t.”

Fast forward to 1999, when Kelsey was a Ph.D. student in Harvard’s Department of History of Art and Architecture. Attending a professional meeting, he couldn’t find a panel on landscape painting, the focus of his own dissertation, so he opted to speak at a session on landscape photography, presenting a talk on 19th century photographer Timothy O’Sullivan.

“After I gave the talk, several members of the audience came up, established scholars from the field, and said how happy they were that I was working on this for my dissertation,” Kelsey said. “And of course I wasn’t working on this for my dissertation. But I thought afterward about the fact that when I did give talks on my dissertation, nobody came up and said the same thing. So I took this as a hint from the universe that I had perhaps stumbled upon a more promising topic than what I had been working on.”

In short order, Kelsey shifted gears, producing a dissertation on O’Sullivan’s photographic survey of the American West following the Civil War. A year later, weighing Harvard’s offer of a junior faculty position as a historian of photography against offers from elsewhere in American art more generally, he again felt that the stars were aligning to nudge him toward photography.

“So I leapt into this professional formation of myself as a photo historian, which was a steep learning curve since I had never done any graduate course work that was directed toward history of photography,” he said.

Kelsey’s reinvention reached its denouement last year when he received tenure, becoming the Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Photography. He doesn’t regret the long and winding road to where he is today.

“I feel very lucky to have been able to experience that formation,” he said. “I had the post-1960s view that finding one’s calling could be a very long process. I think it would be very hard now to do what I did. Young people these days feel much more urgency to get their lives sorted out.”

In retrospect, a few threads in Kelsey’s childhood might have foreshadowed his ultimate destination. Both his mother and stepfather were anthropologists, at Hamline University and the University of Minnesota, respectively. Cameras were indispensable in documenting their fieldwork on Indian reservations and in Mexican villages, often with some of their six children in tow.

“My grandfather was a very serious amateur photographer, with a darkroom,” Kelsey said. “I spent time in there, and was fascinated by the equipment and the process.”

A product of public schools in Minneapolis, Kelsey thinks his middle-American upbringing also fed his interest in photography.

“I think there’s something about growing up in the Midwest that gave me a populist angle on culture,” he said. “And so, for me, while I love all areas of art history, I think there is a special fit for me with photography, with its special democratic qualities.”

Photography’s democratic tendencies, which Kelsey dates to the days of the daguerreotype, have only intensified with the advent of ever-more-accessible technologies.

“When photography was invented, it was heralded as this great new democratic way of producing pictures,” he said, “but actually there have been subsequent revolutions that have democratized it even more radically, the ‘Kodak Moment’ being one, and our own digital moment being another.”

Despite these advances, Kelsey himself has a conflicted relationship with the practice of photography. He admits to suffering from what might be called “photographer’s block.”

“I feel burdened by knowing all that has been done, the brilliant things that have been done,” he said. “I am committed to becoming more serious about practice, but it will mean negotiating that past.”

J. Sterling Livingston, a retired professor at Harvard Business School (HBS), died on Feb. 14. He was 93.

Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and raised in and around Glendale, Calif., Livingston received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern California in 1938. In 1948, he moved to Massachusetts to receive a doctorate in business administration at HBS, where he later joined the HBS faculty. Livingston stayed at Harvard until 1971.

Livingston is survived by his wife of 67 years, Ruth; two sons, Matthew of Fairfax, Va., and Sterling Christopher of Richmond, Va.; two daughters, daughter Lucille Held of Boldton, Mass. and Florence Odell of Woodland Hills, Calif.; six granddaughters; five grandsons; and nine great-grandchildren.

Livingston will be buried in Columbia Gardens Cemetery in Arlington, Va., on April 3 at 11 a.m. Memorial services will follow.

Robert J. Madix, a senior research fellow in chemical engineering at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and Sang-Hee Shim, a postdoctoral fellow in chemistry and chemical biology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences along with her mentor Martin T. Zanni, an associate professor of chemistry at University of Wisconsin, Madison, were honored by the American Chemical Society (ACS) in San Francisco on March 23 for their chemistry research.

Madix was presented with the 2010 Garbor A. Somorjai Award for Creative Work for his role in establishing the molecular foundation for elementary surface reactions on single crystal catalytic metals and for his contributions to the understanding of partial oxidation reactions on silver surfaces, the dynamics and kinetics of adsorption and surface reactions, and the atomic-scale imaging of reactive processes on surfaces.

Shim and Zanni received the Nobel Laureate Signature Award for Graduate Education in Chemistry for revolutionizing the technology of two-dimensional infrared spectroscopy. With the new technology, they have performed a groundbreaking study of amyloid fibers.

“Have you ever thought of this?” is how Andrew Gleason often preceded the formulation of some idea, or some question, to his mathematical colleagues and students. Usually we had not (thought of the idea) and even if we had, we would not have expressed it in as clarifying, or as enticing, a manner as he did. The “this” could range quite broadly: ideas related to transformation groups and his famous solution to Hilbert’s Fifth Problem,  to measure theory, projective geometry, Hilbert Spaces, or to combinatorics, to graph theory, to coding theory, or—and this was also one of Gleason’s many great loves—to the teaching and perfection of mathematical skills at any level (how to treat measuring when teaching first-graders; reforming the teaching of Calculus; and savoring the latest Putnam Competition exam questions). Quite a span.

Andrew Gleason’s own early education had a significant geographical span. He graduated from high school in Yonkers, New York, having also taken courses in Berkeley, California. His undergraduate years at Yale were spent largely taking graduate level courses. When Andy graduated in 1942, he joined the U.S. Navy as a member of a group of 8–10 mathematicians working to crack enemy codes.

In 1946 Gleason came to Harvard, having been elected as a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows. To be such a Fellow in those days meant that one could achieve an academic career without having a PhD.  Andy never did pursue a doctoral degree; he spent his time in the Society of Fellows developing a broad mathematical culture and thinking about Hilbert’s Fifth Problem.

At the end of his three-year fellowship, Gleason was appointed Assistant Professor of Mathematics in the Harvard Department of Mathematics. Soon thereafter, he took a two-year leave of absence from Harvard to return to the U.S. Navy to serve during the Korean War (mid-1950 to mid-1953). After this, Gleason returned to Harvard where he spent the rest of his academic career. He was appointed Professor of Mathematics in 1957.

Gleason married Jean Berko in 1959.  Jean Berko Gleason, a prominent psycholinguist, has had a distinguished academic career as Professor in the Department of Psychology at Boston University. The Gleasons have three daughters: Katherine, Pamela, and Cynthia.

Gleason was named the Hollis Professor of Mathematicks and Natural Philosophy in 1969 (the oldest endowed chair in the sciences in the United States).  He became a Senior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows in 1977 and was Chair of the Society of Fellows from 1989 to 1996. Gleason retired from Harvard University in 1992.

His mathematical conversations, his seminar discussions, his writing, and his lectures had qualities most cherished in a mathematician:  he was comprehensible, clear and to the point; his formulations had a scintillating precision, and they were always delivered with enthusiasm and wide-eyed wonder. One of his colleagues once summed up this saying: “When he touched a thing, he made it shine.”

Our late colleague Raoul Bott once joked that Andy lacked the essential Hungarian talent for being absent when an important administrative task needed to be done.  One of us recounted this in a talk at Andy’s memorial service, adding:

Andy served Harvard, his department, the Society of Fellows, and the mathematical profession with generosity and skill. Although he held strong opinions, he never imposed them on others, and never made anyone feel small if they didn’t possess his brilliance. In fact, I never heard Andy raise his voice, either in conversation or in a meeting. That’s not to say he wasn’t convincing—it was his vision of a small faculty, training the best graduate students and amplified by the energy of outstanding undergraduates, that defines the mathematics department we have at Harvard today.

Gleason’s best known work is his resolution of Hilbert’s Fifth Problem. David Hilbert, slightly over a century ago, formulated two dozen problems that have, since then, represented celebrated milestones measuring mathematical progress. Many of the advances in Hilbert’s problems initiate whole new fields, new viewpoints. Those few mathematicians who have resolved one of these problems have been referred to as members of the Honors Class.

Hilbert fashioned his  “Fifth Problem” as a way of offering a general commodious context for the then new theory of Sophus Lie regarding transformation groups. Nowadays, Lie’s theory is the mainstay of much mathematics and physics, and his kind of groups, “Lie groups,” constitute an important feature of our basic scientific landscape.

One can think of a transformation group as a collection of symmetries of a geometric space.  Some spaces admit infinitely many symmetries: think of the circle, which can be rotated at any angle.  The grand problem facing Sophus Lie is how to deal with these infinite groups of symmetries. Can one use the methods of Calculus effectively to treat the issues that arise in connection with these infinite transformation groups?

At the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Cambridge in 1950, Andy proposed a possible method to arrive at an (affirmative!) answer to this question, in the context proposed by Hilbert.   Andy emphasized the central role played by the one-parameter subgroups in the picture. The following year he proved a key result about maximal connected compact subgroups, and the year after that, using results of Montgomery & Zippin, and Yamabe, Andy clinched things, and showed that the answer to Hilbert’s question answer is “yes.” An extremely important advance.

The depth of Andy’s work is extraordinary, as is its breadth: from his computer explorations very early in the history of machine computation (a search problem in the n-cube) to solving a conjecture of our late colleague George Mackey (about measures on the closed subspaces of a Hilbert space) to the intricacies of finite projective geometry and coding theory, to the relationship between complex analytic geometry and Banach algebras. Gleason was also one of the rare breed of mathematicians who did not stay on just one side of the Pure mathematics/ Applied mathematics “divide.” In fact, his work and attitude gave testimony to the tenet that there is no essential divide. Indeed, the ideas and mathematical interests that Andy nurtured in his applied work for the government, which was a passion for him throughout his lifetime, connects well with his public work on finite geometries, and his love for combinatorics.

Andy’s interest in the training of mathematicians and in exposition and teaching in general, led him to edit, with co-authors, a compendium of three decades of William Lowell Putnam mathematical competition problems, to write a bold text formulating the foundations of analysis starting with a grand and lucid tour of logic and set theory, and also to engage in the important project of K-12 mathematical education, and to reform efforts in the teaching of Calculus.

The founding idea behind the various mathematical education initiatives with which Andy was involved—either the programs for early mathematical education that were referred to (by both detractors and promoters) as New Math, or the programs for teaching Calculus (providing syllabi and texts that came to be referred to as the Harvard Consortium)—was to present mathematics concretely and intuitively, and to energize and empower the students and teachers. The essential mission of the Calculus Consortium was and is Andy’s credo that the ideas should be based in equal parts of geometry for visualization of the concepts, computation to ground it in the real world, and algebraic manipulation for power.

This relates to Andy’s general view: that a working mathematician should have at his or her disposal a toolkit of basic techniques for analyzing any problem. He felt that all good problems in math—at any level—should weave together algebra, geometry, and analysis, and students must learn to draw on any of these tools, having them all “at the ready.” Andy emphasized this in the Mathematics Department’s discussion regarding the structure of the department’s comprehensive qualifying exam for graduate students. He also loved to think about exam problems that exhibited this unifying call upon different techniques; for example, he would work out the problems of the (undergraduate) Putnam Competition exam, year after year, just for fun.

Andy had many honors. He received the Newcomb Cleveland Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Science for his work on Hilbert’s Fifth Problem. He received the Yueh-Gin Gung and Dr. Charles Y. Hu Award for Distinguished Service to Mathematics—the Mathematical Association of America’s most prestigious award. He was president of the American Mathematical Society (1981–1982), a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.

Respectfully submitted,

Benedict Gross

David Mumford (Brown University)

Barry Mazur, Chair

Sarah Sweeney of the Harvard Gazette has been awarded a $5,000 prize from the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation. The foundation annually honors poets under the age of 40 whose work celebrates the human spirit.

Sweeney, who edits the Gazette’s books page, “Harvard Bound,” is a native of Greensboro, N.C. She received her M.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College in Boston. Several of her poems are forthcoming in Tar River Poetry, Waccamaw, Quarterly West, The Pinch, The Collagist, and Minnetonka Review.

“Our grandmothers had gone about with books poised on their heads, we felt very modern to have substituted fencing. “ – Mosette Stafford Vaughn, Radcliffe College Class of 1891.

Qualification for the NCAA Championships has become something of a ritual for recent members of the Harvard women’s fencing team, a far cry from the sports origins on campus dating back to 1888, but not far removed from the year the team officially came into being in 1974. Back then, team Captain Sara Kimball ’76, described as a “colorful, temperamental character, not easily forgotten by those who encountered her,” helped lead a resurgence of a competitive team that was tempered through hard work, perseverance, and no shortage of team spirit

Much the same could be said of epeeist Noam Mills ’12, current captain of the women’s team and member of the Israeli Olympic Team that competed in Beijing in 2008. For Mills, intercollegiate fencing has helped change her perspective on the sport, and credits her teammates with making the transition from Israel to Harvard an easy one. “It’s very different (in a good way) when I have teammates to share the joy of winning and the agony of losing with, “ Mills says.

Harvard University recently played host to the 2010 NCAA Fencing Championships, being held from March 25–28 at the Gordon Indoor Track. Harvard’s Caroline Vloka ‘12 won the national title in Women’s Sabre, while her teammate Mills finished second in Women’s Épée. Vloka became Harvard’s first female NCAA Champion since Emily Cross ‘08-09 won the Women’s Foil title in 2005.

Robert C. Merton, John and Natty McArthur University Professor at Harvard Business School and the 1997 co-winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in the Economic Sciences, recently received the Kolmogorov Medal from the University of London in recognition of his distinguished work in fields of research influenced by the renowned Russian mathematician Andrei N. Kolmogorov (1903-1987). Merton also delivered a lecture titled “Observations on the Science of Finance in the Practice of Finance: Past, Present, and Future.”

Merton’s research focuses on developing finance theory in the areas of capital markets and finance institutions. According to University of London Professor Alex Gammerman, “Andrei Kolmogorov is widely regarded as a founder of stochastic processes. One of the most spectacular applications of that theory is to the theory of pricing financial derivatives, which originated in the work of Robert Merton in collaboration with fellow Nobel laureate Myron Scholes and the late Fischer Black.”

When Merton’s Nobel was announced, Carliss Y. Baldwin, the William L. White Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, remarked, “Few economists have contributed theories of such breadth and beauty; fewer still have seen their ideas put to such immediate practical use. Like Paul Samuelson, Bob Merton has changed the foundations on which the science of economics is built.”
In his prize lecture, Merton offered observations on the structural elements of the worldwide financial crisis, on needed financial regulatory changes, and on the important role of financial innovation and science in the future.

Merton is past president of the American Finance Association, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He joined the Harvard Business School faculty in 1988.

At its eleventh meeting of the year on March 24, the Faculty Council discussed a proposed conflict of interest policy and the report of the Committee to Review the Administrative Board.

The council next meets on April 14. The preliminary deadline for the May 11 faculty meeting is April 26 at 9:30 a.m.

Augustus A. White III, the Ellen and Melvin Gordon Distinguished Professor of Medical Education and professor of orthopedic surgery at Harvard Medical School, was recently honored with the fifth annual William W. Tipton Jr. M.D. Leadership Award for his work as an educator, mentor, and champion of diversity initiatives. The award, which includes a $5,000 honorarium, was presented to White at the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) Annual Meeting in New Orleans.

“I am surprised, humbled, and inspired to be receiving this award,” said White. “I feel particularly honored to be recognized among so many individuals I admire.”

Established by friends, colleagues, and organizations through AAOS and the Orthopaedic Research and Education Foundation (OREF), the Tipton Award honors the qualities exemplified by the late Dr. Tipton, including leadership, commitment to mentorship, diversity, bridge-building, and collaboration.

White has served as a mentor to Harvard medical students as a former master of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Society, an organization committed to the promotion and support of the academic and professional development of Harvard’s medical students through a system of academic advising and a series of enrichment programs.

“I’ve been very fortunate to have some world-class mentors, starting with my parents, then on to my professors and my peers,” said White. “I firmly believe that giving students the opportunity to find a mentor also gives them a greater opportunity to be successful.”

In addition to his mentoring work, White dedicates much of his life to diversity-related issues. He is a founding member and founding president of the J. Robert Gladden Orthopaedic Society, a multicultural organization dedicated to advancing excellent musculoskeletal care for all patients, with particular attention to underserved groups. White also served as the inaugural chairman of the AAOS Diversity Committee.

After being the first African-American to graduate from Stanford University School of Medicine and the first African-American orthopedic resident at Yale Medical Center, White served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps in Vietnam and received a Bronze Star Medal. He later earned his Ph.D. in research on biomechanics of the spine at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.

What does Whoopi Goldberg have to do with neuroscience?

A lot, says Jeff Brown, co-author with Mark Fenske of “The Winner’s Brain.” Goldberg, an Oscar-winning actress and now the frank and hilarious moderator of “The View,” is a model of resilience, according to Brown, an instructor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She has weathered some of life’s hardest knocks, including growing up in a New York City housing project, three divorces, and her daughter’s teenage pregnancy, but has always bounced right back.

“When it comes to the brain, winning equals success,” said Brown. “And success can be obtained across many different aspects of life, from being able to evaluate what is important, recognizing valuable opportunities, to finding the motivation to achieve your goals. Each of us is geared with different preferences, desires, hopes, and drives. When it comes to deciding how we want to win — how to be successful — we’re in the driver’s seat.”

“The Winner’s Brain” combines cognitive neuroscience and fMRI scanning (“which gives us the best look we have so far at the brain in action”) with cognitive behavioral psychology that, said Brown, has long provided specific tools with marked results for making lasting behavioral and emotional changes. (fMRI stands for functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging.) With this dual understanding, Brown and Fenske navigate and identify the functions of a healthy, winning brain: memory, adaptability, emotions, self-awareness, motivation, and more.

“A New York City window washer and London cab drivers are examples of people we interfaced with to learn how they optimize the human brain,” said Brown. “In each case illustrated, we’ve identified credible fMRI research to help illuminate the stories and give firm foundation to the suggestions we make for readers.”

But along the way, the authors also interviewed some well-known winners such as actress Laura Linney, athlete Kerri Strug, and artist Andrew Wyeth.

“While we never actually made it to Kevin Bacon,” joked Brown, “in most cases, we gravitated toward an individual because of their expertise and what the research was guiding. B.B. King talked with us about current research with jazz musicians, and Phyllis Diller was glad to talk and laugh with us about risk.”

For those of us lagging in the brain department, there’s hope yet. The book features more than a dozen brain exercises (called “brainstorms”), but the biggest success factor appears to be self-awareness.

“We believe self-awareness is key to reaching your goals,” said Brown. “If you don’t have an accurate sense of self-awareness, then it’s much more likely that you’ll be incompetent at the tasks you undertake.”

Brown calls this “the double whammy of incompetence.”

“The first whammy occurs because the person is not particularly good at something — and the second whammy comes as a result of them not knowing that they are not very good at it,” he said. “Knowing our strengths and weaknesses is key for effectively using the skills we already possess and working to improve the skills we would like to possess.”

Shelter from the season’s pounding rains, a jump-start for earthquake-stalled classrooms, and employment for those robbed of work by Haiti’s Jan. 12 quake top the list of needs in the disaster-stricken nation, a former prime minister said during an interview while visiting the Harvard Kennedy School.

Michèle Pierre-Louis, who was the island nation’s prime minister for a year until last September, said Haitians should salute the international outpouring of aid for her country. But she added that, despite the aid, many people remain homeless, and their frustration is rising. During a trip to one of the smaller displaced-persons camps in Port-au-Prince in early March, Pierre-Louis said several people told her that she was the first nonmedical person to visit.

Pierre-Louis, who runs the nonprofit Knowledge and Freedom Foundation, was at the Kennedy School on a weeklong visiting fellowship. She said Haiti’s most immediate problem is what to do with the million or so people made homeless by the quake, many of them huddled in makeshift settlements that have sprung up around the city. Making their plight worse, she said, is that the rainy season has begun, making the camps a muddy mess and the leaky shelters uncomfortable.

“It’s a big problem. To me, that’s urgent,” Pierre-Louis said. “People are extremely frustrated. Nobody speaks to them except for the doctors.”

Beyond the housing problem, Pierre-Louis said another important concern is education. Five thousand schools collapsed, she said, and the quake affected more than a million students. All of the nation’s universities were damaged.

“How are we going to restore education? Is it time to rethink the educational system in Haiti?” Pierre-Louis asked.

Jobs are another critical issue, she said. Haitians are willing to work — and to spend what they earn to stimulate the economy — if only they can get jobs. She said international organizations in Haiti should conduct their operations with a mind to employing Haitians whenever possible.

“Frustration will grow if people are sitting in the mud doing nothing,” Pierre-Louis said.

Overall, she said, the quake’s toll of many thousands dead and wounded shows how inadequate everyday conditions are in Haiti. The many deaths, the large number of buildings that collapsed, and the inability of social structures to function properly all need to be addressed in a nation prone to natural disasters.

Several such issues are likely to be addressed at a donor conference scheduled for March 31 in New York, she said. The “International Donors’ Conference Towards a New Future for Haiti” will be held at the United Nations and will feature representatives of Haiti’s government and of several major donor nations. They will discuss Haiti’s development needs and priorities for future aid.

In addition to the many dead and the large number of damaged buildings, Port-au-Prince lost 600,000 residents who left the city to live with family members in the countryside. Pierre-Louis said the capital city has lost nearly a third of its pre-quake population.

Despite the tragedy, Pierre-Louis said that Haiti in the end will have an opportunity to renew itself. As donor nations plan future aid, she said, they should consider infrastructure upgrades. The limitations of Port-au-Prince’s small airport and lone port were clearly illustrated early in the catastrophe. The poor condition of the nation’s roads also is well-known. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January, Pierre-Louis said she was surprised at the strong interest from entrepreneurs willing to do business in Haiti.

“I said, ‘My God, we should not miss that opportunity.’”

When clocks recognized a tenth of a second, the world would never be the same, says Canales, an associate professor in the history of science who melds technology, philosophy, and science in this heady history.